


missing stitch and flowers on a headstone

by gothfriend



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Blood, Body Horror, Canon Compliant, F/M, Hanahaki Disease, Pining, Sibling Incest, Twincest, lup is a jealous monster and i love her, the incest isnt explicitly romantic and its never like RETURNED but its explicit enough you feel?, transposed directly onto the canon timeline with no changes other than the hanahaki thing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-16
Updated: 2020-09-16
Packaged: 2021-03-07 03:14:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,239
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26499940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gothfriend/pseuds/gothfriend
Summary: Lup’s mouth was filled with roses, a single bloom sprouting and coating the entirety with soft, velvety petals. The thorns scratched at the roof of her mouth with every slight movement. The petals of the rose dripped with blood. Sometimes, she thought she could feel the thorns inside her lungs moving, furling outwards, scraping against her other organs.If she’d been alive, Lup would have died a long time ago.Mind the tags.
Relationships: Lup/Taako (The Adventure Zone)
Comments: 12
Kudos: 17





	missing stitch and flowers on a headstone

**Author's Note:**

> for every negative comment i get, i will write another oneshot and/or post one more piece of taacocest art on my tumblr. i am serious and i am keeping count. you have been warned.

There were many things Lup could handle. Being trapped in an umbrella was one of them.

Hell, being trapped in an umbrella didn’t even grace the top ten worst things that had ever happened to her. Having your entire universe destroyed by an all-consuming dark hunger tended to shift your baseline for those kinds of things.

Time didn’t have any meaning there, caught among those endless red curtains. She’d forged through them blindly at first, fingers stretched, grasping, hunting, for any hint of an exit. The light was uniform, with no source to be found in any direction, no change with any amount of time. No way to count the hours she spent clawing through fabric. She gave up eventually.

Lup didn’t feel much of a need to keep track of time, anyway. She’d spent a century on a hundred different planets, a hundred different time zones, a hundred different ways to count the hours.

She spent a while raging against the unfairness of it all—no way to help her family, no guarantee that they’d ever meet again. Being a lich was supposed to guarantee that, no matter what, she could come back, she could _help_ , she could _guide them—_

But when she started digging bloody half-moons into the palms of her hands, and when her rage turned her gut inside-out, raked her nails down her arms til they drew blood, left her voice raw and her throat tight from all the fucking _screaming_ , that was when she swallowed down a bile-filled curse and sat down.

No sense losing her mind yet, not when she had gods-only-knew-how-long to wait for something to happen.

So Lup waited. She paced in circles. She tapped rhythms on the floor. She draped herself in curtains and hid in the endless void, playing games with imaginary opponents.

She talked.

“Bet this looks pretty lame, huh?” Lup was lying on the floor, hands idly tapping rhythm after rhythm. Anything to break the silence. “Oh, how the mighty do fall.” Taako laughed and shoved her on the arm. Or maybe he sniped back with something cutting about her situation. Or maybe he was leaning in towards a mirror, pulling his hair into a shining updo, and he sneered at her affectionately in the mirror of his vanity. The one he kept in his bedroom. Back on the ship.

“Don’t worry, hon. I’ll get myself out of here.” Barry stroked her shaggy hair. Or he grabbed her hand and told her he believed in her. Or—

“Fucking hell,” she spat, and rolled over onto her chest, pressing her face into the endless void. The sound of her own voice was better than the echoes of her family’s ghosts. “Get your shit together, Lulu, you can’t go crazy this—nn.” She winced, turned her head to the side, opened and closed her mouth a few times.

It wasn’t really fair to say she had a _body_ in this void; she was a lich, after all, and the realm inside of the umbrella was more a representation of physical space than an actual space she occupied. It was more like she had a perception of herself, and she had a perception of the space, and those combined to make her think she had a body. Regardless, there was still something stuck in her throat.

Lup tried futilely a few times to clear her throat, but the blockage stayed. Bile rising, she dragged herself up to her knees, palms pressed against the formless non-texture of the floor. She coughed once, twice.

It did not dislodge.

A deep, primal fear began rising; she fought it back with the things she logically _knew—_ of course she couldn’t die here, she was already a fucking lich, wasn’t she? She couldn’t choke to death, not when she didn’t have a form to begin with. All Lup was, was an idea, a concept of a person left behind—this was not helping.

She pressed her forehead to the floor, wracked with deep, wet coughs that shook her ribcage, breathing harsh and hysterical—and then something dislodged and fell to the floor.

She took a deep breath. Her skin felt clammy, her throat felt tight, her mouth tasted acidic. Finally, she opened her eyes to see whatever was stuck inside of her.

It was dark red. Round. Much smaller than it felt when she was sure she would choke on it. She peered at it for a few moments before what it was actually registered in her mind.

A rose petal.

* * *

It didn’t take Lup long to understand what was happening. She’d been on this plane for a few years; of course she knew about the magical diseases common to the area, she was a fucking multiplanar magical scholar, maybe the only one in the planar system (other than the rest of the Starblaster crew, of course).

What she didn’t understand was why. How could she be feeling unrequited love for someone when she goddamn well hadn’t met anyone new? She’d been trapped in this umbrella for gods only knew how long, she sure didn’t have a riveting fucking social life here.

It took Lup a few paces through the endless fields of curtains, coughing the occasional petal into her hands, to hit on something.

Of course. The fucking Voidfish.

“Idiot,” she muttered. Then, “Barry?” Her pacing paused; one of her hands froze while idly trailing along a curtain. Her fingers twisted into the velvety fabric, almost subconsciously.

“Can’t be requited love if he doesn’t fucking remember me,” she managed to choke out. Her fingers hurt.

“Why wouldn’t you kill yourself, moron—“ she spat savagely—but no. No. That was a good point, actually. “Why wouldn’t you?” Liches wouldn’t be affected by the Voidfish, obviously. They weren’t really _people_ , not properly; they existed outside of existence, in a sense. Barry knew this. If he was forgetting her—if he could feel her slipping away from him like that—he wouldn’t lie down and let it happen. She knew her husband like her own mind—better, sometimes.

“It can’t be you,” she mumbled. Her hand released the curtain. A cursory glance over it revealed that her knuckles were white and shaking.

A cursory coughing fit brought up a whole clump of petals.

* * *

The one thing that Lup hung her sanity on, the thing that kept her from screaming her throat bloody and looping the curtains into nooses, was that Barry had to be out there. Barry was going to find her. Her husband was a lich, and he remembered, and he would find her, and he would recognize the Umbra staff, and he would do _something._

She could feel changes happening inside of her. No matter how much she reminded herself that she was fine, she was immaterial, nothing that happened to her could hurt her, it still couldn’t quell the blinding panic that she felt breathing in and feeling the air whistle past the leaves in her windpipe. It couldn’t stop the thorns from scraping her from the inside, either. Her lungs screamed every time she drew a breath, but she couldn’t stop breathing—she’d been doing it her entire life. A Lup who didn’t breathe was incomprehensible to her subconscious mind.

It couldn’t be Barry. It _couldn’t_.

Something echoed.

Lup jolted upright; her head automatically craned back to stare upwards, into the ever-fucking-looming curtains. Was that—

“Excuse me. Whichever one you are, the uh, dwarf. There’s a cane here to look at.”

It echoed oddly through the inside of her skull; it felt more like a presence than true sounds, but that just made Lup more certain of what she was hearing. She’d know that voice anywhere. That was her heart.

“What kind of vibe did you get from it?” Taako asked, and Lup’s soul soared—

\--and came back down with a vengeance.

“Taako!” she screamed, leaping to her feet, grasping at the curtains frantically, trying to lift herself off the ground. “Taako, please, it’s me—Taako! It’s Lup! It’s me! Taako, _please—_ ”

But he couldn’t hear her. Gods help her, he couldn’t hear her. And he was speaking to Merle like… like…

… like they had just met.

“Wrap it in the robe and bring it along,” he was saying, almost dismissively, and _no_ , Lup would be fucked if she’d let him talk about her like that.

She felt Merle’s presence strengthen, like he was reaching out, like he was making contact, and with an instinct she didn’t even know she had, Lup flung her hand out, a strangled cry coming from somewhere deep in her chest, and then she heard a loud _thunk_ and a sardonic “Oh, golly.”

A bitter smile wormed its way across her face. She hadn’t meant to hurt Merle, but, well. Shit happens.

“My turn,” and there it was, there was the feeling of her heart, _there he was,_ and Lup’s fingers twitched and broken laughter came spilling from her lips and electricity raced through her veins and for a second, she almost felt whole.

Almost.

There was a moment of silence.

“… So now I have an umbrella,” he said, and she screamed with laughter.

* * *

She found out where Barry was pretty quickly.

“I’ve never seen—well I’ve never seen him like this—“ and he sounded so new, so scared, so vulnerable and so _not her husband,_ that her heart broke all over again.

She’d had one hope. One thing to cling to. One chance.

Lup slapped herself. Literally; she smacked herself across the cheek with a force that made her skin sting and flush. “Shut up,” she told herself firmly, because sure, she’d been wrong, but it was okay. They were all there. And Lup was an intelligent gal. As long as her family was there, she had a chance to fix this. To get through to them somehow.

(But where was Davenport, where was Lucretia?)

(And did Lucretia’s idiotic plan have something to do with this?)

She shook that line of thought off. No time for that. Shit was burning.

Literally.

* * *

Hearing the words “Barry’s dead” stabbed Lup in the fucking gut.

There was nothing to be done about it. And Lup should have been happy. He couldn’t die, he was a lich—he’d remember her now. He could _help_.

But the way all three of them screamed, desperately—the way Taako said “I’m not leaving without Barry,” even though she damn well knew he couldn’t even begin to understand what Barry meant to him—it fucking hurt, okay?

“Be happy,” she whispered to herself. “At least you’ll be rid of the fucking flowers now.”

That was the moment she was sent into another coughing fit; when she took her hands away, they were red and wet with blood, petals stuck to her palms and to each other.

The scent in her nostrils was cloying.

* * *

She didn’t understand it.

The only thing she could think of was that Barry had escaped somehow, and wasn’t a lich after all—but no, that was completely impossible. They said he’d been crushed by the gauntlet. (Her gauntlet. Lup didn’t think about that for very long.) And the entire town had been blown to shit…

… Lup could feel the vines twitching and growing underneath her skin. There were buds unfurling in the back of her throat, now.

She spent endless ages puzzling, in-between bouts of helpless rage as she listened to the world going on without her. Fucking Lucretia. This shit fit her perfectly—director of a powerful organization, the ability to manipulate dozens, if not hundreds, of pawns for her plans.

Maybe that was uncharitable. But there was no way Lucretia didn’t remember. Her cover story was _too_ perfect.

And sometimes, if Lup was listening closely, she could hear a hitch in Lucretia’s voice when she was talking to the boys.

But Lup couldn’t feel sorry for her. Not when Taako, her heart, was so close, too fucking close for her to not be able to touch him. Not when her family were all shadows of their former selves. Not when she heard Davenport, fucking _Davenport_ , babbling like a mindless child.

Not when Lucretia poisoned her family against her own fucking husband.

There were nights when she sobbed brokenly, clawing at the curtains, spitting blood out between screams. “Trust him! Trust Barry! Please, please Taako, you have to trust him…”

She’d put herself back together pretty quickly after that. No way Lup was letting herself lose her shit this early, not when there was still work she could do.

Besides, at least she knew he remembered, now.

Every day, she ached to feel her brother’s touch again. She’d wait on tenterhooks, breathing raggedly through the stems inching their way up into her mouth, to feel his presence even a bit closer than normal. Sometimes, when he grasped the handle of the Umbrastaff, she’d imagine she could feel his hands on her. Maybe she actually could.

And when he used her to do magic—when she reached into herself, found the part that was intertwined with him, _pulled_ and _grasped_ and sent out something bigger than either of them—her blood sang, and she spun through the curtains, twisting and weaving and cackling.

Maybe that was when she started to get what was happening.

* * *

“Hey, Taako, can I ask you a question?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Who taught you how to do magic?”

Lup froze. She‘d been in a routine-filled daze for gods knew how long, at that point. Do magic with Taako. Painstakingly pick the petals out from where they were growing under her nails. Breathe, slowly, so as not to hurt her lungs. Cough blood. Cough up entire buds. Cough up a rose head, one memorable time. Listen, always listen, for anything that she could act on, any chance she had to reach her family.

Angus’s question lit something in her. Some incessant, twitching rage that she couldn’t clamp down on. Because of course Taako hadn’t learned magic himself, she’d been right there with him, the whole time. He’d never have been able to do half the shit he’d done without her.

“’That’s a long story,’ my fucking ass,” she spat at the heavens.

She had no right to be angry with him. It wasn’t Taako’s fault he didn’t even know she existed—that was Lucretia all the way, she was sure of it. It was no accident Lucretia’s organization had the Voidfish. None of this was an accident.

And yet, as he told Angus about his life on this plane, her blood ran cold. He told Angus about his career, and about that one fucking mistake that he talked about so cavalierly, like it didn’t even matter, but she knew her Taako and she knew he had to be in so much pain over it, and _she should have been there with him._

Everything smelled like roses. Her nose was bleeding.

She wiped it off with the back of one shaking hand and stared at the red smear for what felt like years, until she felt Taako’s hands on her. Felt him lift her up for another bit of trivial magic.

“ _No!_ ” she snapped, and she _yanked_ , and she fucking _destroyed._

And, well, Angus’s macarons were bad, but they probably didn’t deserve all that. But it didn’t matter. Lup was furious, and she was shaking, and the roses in her throat were choking her, and she pulled at her link with Taako again, and again, and again, until it was done.

And she slumped to the floor, her entirely body trembling.

“What is… What is L-U-P?” Taako asked.

Lup laughed bitterly.

* * *

The coughs became worse and worse, til they wracked her entire body and her ribs felt like they’d crack under the pressure. Lup’s mouth was filled with roses at this point, with a single bloom sprouting and coating the entirety with soft, velvety petals. The thorns scratched at the roof of her mouth with every slight movement. The petals of the rose dripped with blood. Sometimes, she thought she could feel the thorns inside her lungs moving, furling outwards, scraping against her other organs.

If she’d been alive, Lup would have died a long time ago.

Perks of this stupid fucking form, she guessed.

If she’d been alive, Lup would have mocked her brother mercilessly for this stupid attempt at a date. Seriously? With the goddamn Grim Reaper? Taako had always had a flair for the dramatic, so it wasn’t like she was surprised.

But Lup wasn’t sure if she liked how much Taako was sharing with this dude. How comfortable he seemed to feel after only a couple interactions (most of which involved Kravitz trying to kill him).

Alright. They were in a life-or-death situation; it wasn’t like Lup had told him everything she shared with Barry, way back when. Hell, some days Lup wasn’t even sure Taako had picked up on what was going on between the two of them. Some days, she hadn’t even known, herself. Taako was lost; even the rest of their family barely knew him anymore, and he had to be subconsciously aching for any form of connection, any tenderness he could grab onto, anything to replace what he didn’t even know he’d lost.

But again. With the goddamn Grim Reaper?

It almost felt like vindication when Lup felt Kravitz’s presence darken and he started asking some uncomfortable questions. Almost. She wasn’t that petty.

“I eat dead dudes with my umbrella, is that it, maybe?”

“I don’t—“ Kravitz sounded both bemused and exhausted. “No, I don’t think it’s that.”

“Sucker,” Lup choked out. It hurt like a bitch, but it felt nice to get a jab in, even if nobody could hear it. She raised her arm—raised _herself_ up.

She could feel the reaper’s energy roiling around her, too close for comfort. She’d be damned if she got dragged off to Hell or whatever right then. Maybe one day, she’d get whatever was coming to her. Not that day. Not when she still had work to do. Not when the Hunger was coming; not when she needed to protect her family; not when she needed to protect her heart.

“Come _on_ , Taako, you don’t understand.” Her mouth tasted like copper. She could feel his will struggling against hers, feel his arm almost like a physical form against her. “Cut it out!”

And she was thrown backwards with a gasp, into the embrace of the endless curtains.

The spell she had been charging shot into the sky harmlessly.

Lup fell into listlessness again, staring into the towering depths of the curtains. If she just shifted her perspective a little bit, she could pretend she was floating, staring down into an endless hole. She wasn’t sure which she preferred.

Kravitz was babbling about liches, and honestly, Lup couldn’t give less of a shit. He was going to try to kill her eventually, but the moron wrote off the staff immediately. She was safe, for the moment.

Lup opened her mouth, ran a finger around the roof, careless of the thorns, and drew it back out covered in blood. Her heart felt like a bruise beating itself against her ribs over and over.

She looked at her own blood in the omnipresent half-light.

She understood.

* * *

Of course it was Taako.

Of course it was her heart. It was the other half of her soul. It was the only person she couldn’t fucking bear not knowing her.

She could take Barry not loving her; she knew she could survive without his love. She had for over a hundred years, of course.

But Lup had never gone a moment without Taako by her side. Even when her and Barry fell in love, and the twins began spending more time apart, even then it felt odd to be alone with Barry, like she was operating without a limb. Or without a side of her brain. She’d even be in bed with Barry, naked and doing all kinds of scandalous married-couple things (and then some), and something would feel _missing_. Sometimes, she’d creep to Taako’s bed at night and crawl in with him. Just to sleep, of course.

(But why was that “of course?” Was there something else she wanted?)

(After two hundred years, who could say?)

Like she’d told him all those years ago, Barry had her heart, but Taako _was_ her heart.

And to see Taako getting comfort from someone else, someone new—to see him so obviously needing to replace her in his life, without even knowing who she was to him—it was fucking unbearable.

Lup lay on the floor and melted into the feeling of every thorn under her skin, every petal caught in her throat, every breath disturbing the leaves. She imagined she could feel the vines tearing apart her ventricles, imagined that when she pressed her fingers into her collarbones, she could feel the impressions of rosebuds underneath her skin.

It was better than nothing.

* * *

Lup felt savage, and ugly, and bloody.

She sneered, examining the lich-elf—Edward, she’d heard earlier—shuddering at her feet. He was staring at her with a mixture of awe and fear and she felt giddy with power for it.

Lup’s hair was filled with thorns; blood dripped from every part of her body; roses unfurled at a maddening pace inside of her and every exhalation brought a cloud of swirling petals with it, along with the dribbles of blood. The breathing had gotten easier as her body degraded. The disease had probably never progressed this far in anyone. Lup knew that she probably looked like a fucking monster, but given the circumstances, she regarded that as a bonus.

“Are you the one who’s been hurting my brother out there?”

The elf scrabbled around on the floor, head swiveling back and forth. “Where—am I—where are we?”

She figured she wasn’t gonna get an answer out of him. Lup coughed, just once, spraying the back of her hand with red droplets and releasing a cloud of petals into the air. Edward flinched back.

Lup bared her teeth in a humorless approximation of a grin.

“I’m going to fucking kill you now.”

* * *

“Taako, it’s me, it’s Lup—“

Idiot. Why did she say that? He didn’t know her name anymore. He probably wouldn’t even be able to hear it.

“It’s me,” she said again, lamely. “Trust Barry. Love Barry.”

And that was it. What else could she say?

Lup let her grasp on the Band fade, let it give way to his conversation with Magnus.

She was so tired. She was so fucking tired.

Taako had lost so much, and Barry, her last goddamn hope, didn’t recognize her inside this stupid fucking umbrella, and her family was still broken, breaking more with every moment.

But things were coming, things she used to see every night in her nightmares, back when she slept, and she couldn’t give up.

* * *

And she couldn’t fucking _feel him!_

Taako couldn’t just drop her. How fucking dare he let go of her, how dare he let someone else take her, he should know who she was by then—he _remembered_ , why couldn’t he fucking see, it was so obvious!

The flowers were shriveling back and there was fire in her blood; she could feel the force of his love for her, stronger than anything she’d felt in her life, but it was all anger and hurt and rage and gods above he thought she was _dead._

“I’m here! Get me the fuck _out!_ ”

Her limbs flailed at the curtains uselessly; she bashed parts of her body against the floor, flung herself through the red fabric, _Taako, please, I’m here, Taako,_ but it was all pointless.

He couldn’t hear her, could he?

Wilting petals sloughed from her body as she raged; she could _feel_ the kid’s hands on her, and that was wrong, no-one else was allowed to touch her, so she shoved the kid away and she cast the best damn fireball she could.

Her veins sang with pure, brilliant fire, and she _snarled,_ thorns falling away from her insides. There was yelling outside, but she didn’t pay it any mind. She only cared that she could feel herself sailing through the air, and then—

There he was.

Her heart.

There was a moment of perfect stillness, and in that moment, she knew that they both could feel what was about to happen.

And then—

\--it—

\--it all burst through and she felt mad with joy, she felt _everything_ rushing into her, she heard everything as if it was right there with her, and it was, oh gods it was, and she could _see_ , she laughed once, just once, and then she saw his face.

She knew exactly what she was going to say to him. There he was, older, somehow, but still exactly her height, still a mirror of her own face. His hair swept up in a messy updo, his clothes brightly colored and overly layered like he was going out in a fucking snowstorm, his eyes heavy with loss—but as soon as she met them, they lit up with the most brilliant light she’d ever seen, blinding her, and she was going to say it, she was going to say _I love you_ , and pour every ounce of emotion she’d felt over the past however-many-years into her voice, and instead all that came out was—

“You’re _dating_ the _Grim Reaper?_ ”

**Author's Note:**

> i haven't finished a piece of writing in 4+ years so i apologize if this is choppy, this is my way of getting back into things.
> 
> thanks to leetolgoblin for betaing and saving my entire ass because once i look at a document for more than 10 minutes i lose all perspective on grammar and punctuation and generally how to form a sentence
> 
> PLEASE don't look at my old fic if you liked this, i literally beg of you, all of it is from when i was 15, which at this point is closer to being a decade ago than i would like :(


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